On the Ethics of Unmaking
by AutumnAgain
Summary: Bart did the right thing. He saved the world (by destroying his own) and he had no reason to doubt himself. None. (He tries not to think about all the people who no longer exist).


_A/N: I do not own Young Justice, or any of the characters mentioned here (although I did slightly alter some backstories to better fit with Young Justice canon. I debated changing the names of thirtieth century characters to be more normal, but decided against it. Blame the apocalypse). Reference list of the characters mentioned can be found at the bottom, if anyone wants to look them up._

Bart wondered, sometimes, if he'd done the right thing. He didn't bring it up, of course, especially not to the other members of his team (Jaime's team. Wally's team). Most of the time he didn't wonder at all. Of course he had! The Reach were gone, in a defeat that would leave them wary of Earth for decades to come, and Grandpa Barry was alive to see his children born… and Wally was lost in the Speed Force, maybe forever.

He knew that if he said anything about it, even to Artemis or Dick, they would tell him that Wally had made his choice, that he'd died a hero, that Bart couldn't hold himself responsible. There was guilt enough to share, and holding onto it would kill them all. They'd held that conversation a dozen times already, if wordlessly, through pensive looks and tears and too-tight hugs. There was nothing to be said, not about Wally. It wasn't because of Wally that he wondered.

"The Speed Force has rules," said Aunt Dawn, the first time he'd asked why, if Grandpa Barry (and Great-Grandpa Jay, and the others whose names he didn't know) was in the Speed Force, they couldn't just run in and get him out. "It's a living thing, as well as a natural law, and it doesn't like to give us up once it has us. Our speed is a gift, but eventually we have to give it back."

"But Wally came back."

"Wally had Linda to remind him of who he was." _And your grandmother died years ago, when the bugs decided she was too much trouble to keep alive_ , Aunt Dawn didn't say. Bart understood her anyway. She died too, less than a year later, fending off the bugs with her brother so that Meloni and Jeven could escape with the kids. They never found their bodies either.

(Bart wondered, sometimes, if Wally would come back. He had before, once, but this Wally was a lot younger. His connection to the Speed Force wasn't as deep, and he wasn't even the Flash yet. All Bart could do was hope, and he'd never been very good at that. It wasn't like anyone else came back).

This timeline was better, objectively. Nate was safe, and Jaime was off mode, and no one had to wear inhibitor collars, and his cousins would probably never exist. He missed them. He missed Irey, who passed messages and ran too fast for the bugs to catch and snuck into camps with altered ages and rags made of speed. She was sometimes an old woman, sometimes a little girl, sometimes a teenager, but always his cousin (third cousin, technically, but the power they shared tied them closer than their blood). He missed Jenni, who was probably his best friend before she ran off to Speed Force knew where. Would her parents even meet, without the bugs shifting them around? Would they have anything in common? He missed Owen, even when they argued and Owen used him for target practice with his dumb boomerangs. (The first time he fought the Rogues at Grandpa Barry's side he froze at the sight of Digger Harkness, and took a blast of cold to the side for his distraction. He was too old, and the nose was wrong, but he could see where Owen got the traits he hadn't inherited from Meloni Thawne. The Rogues got away, and even when Grandpa Barry asked he couldn't bear to talk about the brother he'd abandoned to alien invaders and a destroyed timeline). Bart had never gotten to know Jai very well (they were in different work groups), and he'd never really understood him (speed was a gift, even if it did make the bugs look at you close and slap a collar on your neck), but they were still family. Besides, Bart had realized by the time he was six that Jai's passive obedience was the reason nobody looked too closely at the rest of them, and his borrowed speed was the reason Irey didn't get caught. If Dad and Aunt Dawn had been more like their cousins, instead of splitting everything evenly, maybe they would have stood a chance.

Bart liked Artemis, a lot, and he was glad that she had survived her mission in this timeline. That wasn't in doubt, of course it wasn't. She was practically family, after all. (He visited her on the day she had died for real, not that he told her the reason. The League had intercepted a transmission between Black Manta and the Light. The team had investigated, and found her body, still in Tigress' garb, on a beach in pieces. No one ever found out what happened to Kaldur. Bart had heard the story when he was eight, and Cheshire had taken him and Jenni into an abandoned Arrow Cave in what used to be Star City to lay out exactly what had happened to her sister's friends, exactly the kind of risks that his cousins took, that his father and grandfather and aunt had taken. The Flash - Wally - hadn't wanted him to know, arguing that he was still a child, but Meloni had overruled him. "They have powers," she said quietly. "They need to know what sort of legacy they'll inherit." Wally had left after running them there, but Lian had stayed the whole time, clutching her bow and tacitly making sure that they were okay, even though part of the story was about her father, and what had happened when the bugs and the Light finally caught up to him.)

He loved Artemis like family, and he was glad that she and Wally had had each other, but it hurt when he ran past Linda Park, wearing the colors of her dead could-have-been husband and never-going to exist daughter, and she didn't recognize him. Wally and Linda had gotten together a few years after Artemis had died, when it was obvious that the bugs had won and it wasn't worth wasting time on mourning. Bart hadn't seen her in years, but Irey said that she was still alive the last time she checked in, a week before he and Nate finished the machine. (Irey had warned him about going back in time. She told him that she'd once tried to save a friend, only for a girl from Jai's work group to die in her place, but how could things get possibly get worse? He had to try, and if the Speed Force wouldn't let him he'd do it the old fashioned way.)

Lian was great, adorable, but when he saw the happy toddler he couldn't help but think that she would probably never grow into the woman he'd known, the Little Red Riding Hood whose raids had cost the bugs more than anyone else's, whose homemade arrows had been coated in her mother's poisons and loosed with her father's rage. Even Batman had respected her, from his cave in the wreckage of Gotham, and he was trained by the League of Assassins, the grandson of Ra's al Ghul himself. Bart doubted that Damian and Lian would get along in this timeline, if they ever even met. She might still grow up to be a superhero, but she wouldn't develop the edge that had made her so deadly, the drive that had kept her alive when so many of her more powerful allies fell. He couldn't - wouldn't - compare them, it wouldn't be fair to either, but he missed the woman who taught him how to deactivate an inhibitor collar in under a minute without setting off alarms, and told him stories about his grandfather and her father and the Justice League.

The first time he met Kori he had to fight the urge to run. He'd never met her, of course, but everyone knew the story of the Titans, how Darkstar of Themyscira and Tula of Atlantis had bought enough time for Nightstar, Princess of Tamaran and last of the Flying Graysons, to go out in a blaze of glory avenging her parents. She'd done what no one else had managed, before or since, and totally destroyed Green Beetle, wiping out a third of the bugs' heavy hitters in one strike. Bart knew that Lian and Irey both blamed themselves for not being able to save the others, even though they'd all known the risks. The five of them had been a team, once upon a time. Bart wondered if any of them would be born without the end of the world encouraging their parents not to waste time.

That was the problem, the thing that kept Bart from fully accepting that he'd done what he tried to do, saved the world, crashed the mode, fixed everything. He knew that everyone (mostly) survived, but were they better off, really? Cheshire would never really be accepted by the heroes, she'd told him so herself, one night while he was waiting for Artemis so they could zeta to the Watchtower together (she spent a lot of time at Jade's house, in the first few months after everything. He couldn't blame her for not wanting to go home). Would she go back to the Shadows without a war granting her a higher purpose, a reason to keep her skills sharp? In his time, Jade Nguyen and her daughter were the last of the Arrows, defenders of their family's legacy. Was it fair to take that from her? He knew there were others with similar stories, even if he'd never met them personally. (Gotham, for instance, had held out for so long because the local criminals refused to be ruled over, and had the skills to make their city not worth taking. Did he have the right to deny them their place as heroes? A lot of people stayed free because of them.) Dad and Aunt Dawn would probably still be heroes, but they'd be different heroes, not the ones who'd risked life and freedom to protect people, knowing they'd be caught and killed (or worse) if anyone found out who they were. The people he knew were gone, even when he stared them in the face. Bart had destroyed an entire world, wiped millions of people from existence, and he knew full well that he would do it again, if he had to (he didn't think he'd survive if he did).

 ** _A/N: Characters referenced, in order:_**

Bart Allen/Impulse/Kid Flash: son of Don Allen and Meloni Thawne. Speedster.

Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle

Wally West/Kid Flash/The Flash: Barry Allen's nephew. Artemis' boyfriend. Jai and Irey's dad. Speedster.

Barry Allen/The Flash: Speedster. Don and Dawn's dad. Bart's grandfather.

Artemis Crock/Tigress: Wally's girlfriend. Cheshire's little sister.

Dick Grayson/Robin/Nightwing: Wally's best friend.

Dawn Allen: one of the Tornado Twins, with brother Don. Daughter of Barry Allen, wife of Jeven and mother of Jenni. Speedster.

Jay Garrick/The Flash: speedster. Dead of old age by Bart's time.

Linda Park: Wally West's wife in comics canon. Mother of Jai and Irey.

Iris West-Allen: Barry's wife. Don and Dawn's mom. Bart's grandmother.

Don Allen: the other Tornado Twin. Bart's dad. Also a speedster.

Meloni Thawne: Bart and Owen's mom. Don's wife. I'm not touching her family backstory with a ten-foot pole. Suffice it to say that in this canon she is not descended from Barry Allen's evil twin, because that would be incest. May or may not still be related to the Reverse Flash.

Jeven Ognats: Dawn's husband and Jenni's dad. Went missing with Jenni in this canon.

Nathaniel "Nate" Tryon/Neutron: helped Bart build his time machine.

Irey West/Kid Flash/Impulse: Wally and Linda's daughter. Speedster.

Jenni Ognats/XS: Dawn and Jeven's daughter. Speedster. May have run into the future/an alternate universe to join the Legion of Superheroes.

Owen (Mercer) Harkness/Captain Boomerang: son of Meloni Thawne and (a temporally displaced) Digger Harkness, making him Bart's half brother. In this canon he's a few years older than Bart. No powers.

Digger Harkness/Captain Boomerang: Owen's dad. One of the Flash's Rogues.

Jai West: Wally and Linda's son. Technically a speedster, but his sister is draining his connection to the Speed Force to stabilize and strengthen her own, so he can't do much.

Black Manta: Kaldur's evil dad. Artemis was undercover in his operation.

Kaldur'ahm/Aqualad: also undercover.

Jade Nguyen/Cheshire: assassin. Artemis' sister, Red Arrow's wife, Lian's mom.

Lian Harper: Cheshire and Red Arrow's daughter. Archer. About a year older than the Tornado Twins.

Batman/Damian Wayne/Robin: son of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul. Born shortly before Batman and the other Leaguers went to Rimbor.

Ra's al Ghul: supervillain/terrorist/assassin. Damian's grandfather.

Koriand'r/Starfire: Tamaranean princess and superhero. Arrived on Earth not long after Wally disappeared.

"The Titans": since nobody in Young Justice is using the name, I gave it to the group from Kingdom Come (they _are_ the children of the original Teen Titans):

-Lian Harper/[Little] Red [Riding] Hood: no relation to Jason Todd. Daughter of Cheshire and Red Arrow.

-Darkstar: son of Donna Troy, Wonder Woman's little sister.

-Tula (not the dead one): daughter of Garth.

-Mari Grayson/ Nightstar: daughter of Nightwing and Starfire.

-Irey West/Kid Flash: see above.

Some of these characters are canon to Young Justice, but I figured I'd put a refresher anyway, just to keep things clear. Again, none of these are OCs, and I own nothing.


End file.
